The problem with regular SMS The problem with regular SMS is that it does not provide any means of privacy. In the GSM, only the airway traffic between the Mobile Station (MS) and the Base Transceiver Station (BTS) is optionally encrypted with a weak and broken stream cipher (A5/1 or A5/2). There are many vulnerabilities… Continue reading
Deception & Inspection: Gathering intelligence & increasing the red team infrastructure resiliency
Introduction This article primarily targets the red teams. It demonstrates several ways of gathering intelligence about the public security scanners & analyzers and the security platforms and tools used by the target organization. Keywords: C2 Infrastructure resiliency | Cyber Intelligence | Dynamic URL & executable Analyzers | Security Defense Tooling Behavior Benchmark Objectives Whether you’re… Continue reading
File WatchTower: Leveling-up SOC Capabilities
These are abstract ideas. More research and tests will be needed to determine the effectiveness of this project. The problem? SOCs analysts spend time analyzing the “Unknowns.” Lack of sufficient intelligence about new files causes slow response and can lead to other higher risks; compromise, post-exploitation, and other malicious activities. File WatchTower — The Early… Continue reading
Ransomware: Detect & Respond
Hunting for Suspicious DNS Communications
Introduction Adversaries are continuously developing techniques to reduce the detection rate of their malicious activities on an enterprise network; for example, they utilize stenography for data exfiltration, malicious software delivery, and covert C2 communications. This article provides an overview on detecting and hunting suspicious DNS connections in an enterprise network. Requirements In order to be… Continue reading
Establishing an encrypted communication channel over HTTP
In my previous article “Establishing a secure communication channel over HTTP” , I introduced a demo on how to exchange encrypted information over the HTTP protocol using RSA & AES algorithms. This article provides an introduction to how to make encrypted communications between two endpoints over HTTP. The goal is to transmit data securely from… Continue reading
Establishing a secure communication channel over HTTP
This article provides an introduction to how to make encrypted communications between two endpoints over HTTP. The goal is to transmit data securely from one endpoint to another without the need for SSL/HTTPS . To establish an encrypted communication channel, we will take advantage of the RSA and AES algorithms. RSA & AES are the… Continue reading
Hunting ngrok Activity
Ngrok is a genuine software and mainly used by developers to expose local web servers or any other TCP service to the internet. However, ngrok is now widely abused by threat actors and abused in multiple ways including persistence & data exfiltration purposes. ngrok exposes local services to the internet by wrapping TCP connections under… Continue reading
ESS Notifier – Improving SOC Capabilities and Response
Introduction ESS Notifier is a notable security event scanner & notifier for Splunk Enterprise Security. The purpose of this tool is to send/push notifications via Email/Slack/REST API whenever a new security notable event is triggered on Splunk ESS. This tool is ideally best used by Managed Security Service Providers (MSSP) who provide SOC as a… Continue reading
Hunting 0days with YARA Rules
Introduction YARA rules are used at (but not limited to) by malware researchers to identify and classify malware samples. With YARA, you can create descriptions of malware families (or whatever you want to describe) based on textual or binary patterns. Each description, a.k.a rule, consists of a set of strings and a boolean expression that… Continue reading